Oscar-winning actor Riz Ahmed has claimed British intelligence services attempted to recruit him on three separate occasions — including through a senior figure at the BBC — saying the approaches were triggered by his roles in politically charged films about terrorism and British Muslims.
The 43-year-old British Pakistani actor made the revelations during an interview with journalist Mehdi Hasan on his Zeteo platform, describing the alleged recruitment attempts as “inherently comedic” despite their unsettling nature. Ahmed said the first approach came immediately after filming The Road to Guantanamo, his 2006 debut in which he played one of the Tipton Three — British Muslims falsely accused of terrorism and detained by US authorities for two years.
“One was when I came back from my first film, The Road to Guantanamo. We landed at Luton Airport celebrating,” he told Hasan. “They took me into a side room, put me in an arm lock, threatened to break my arm, took my phone, were pretending to bash the buttons, accidentally changed the language to Danish.” Officers then asked him: “Did you become an actor to further the Muslim struggle?” before, he claimed, inviting him to “keep an eye out” for them. He declined. Bedfordshire Police confirmed at the time that Ahmed and his co-stars had been questioned under counter-terrorism laws upon their return from the film’s premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.
Ahmed said the second approach came through a family friend — a development he described with evident discomfort — and the third from a senior BBC executive who has since left the organisation. He did not name the individual. Hasan joked in response: “How do we know you didn’t accept any of these? You tell everyone all three times they tried to recruit you, you don’t mention which of the three times you accepted.”
The disclosures came as Ahmed promoted his new Amazon Prime series Bait, which follows a struggling British-Pakistani actor approached by MI5 while auditioning for the role of James Bond. Ahmed acknowledged the show drew heavily on his own experiences. “I decided to drop a very subtle hint by making a TV show about an actor auditioning to be James Bond and making it for Amazon MGM,” he said. “Inception.”
The series is among the first Bond-related productions from Amazon after the company acquired the rights to the franchise in February 2025 for a reported $1 billion. Reports suggest the search for Daniel Craig’s replacement is now formally under way, adding an additional layer of intrigue to Ahmed’s involvement in the project. Asked directly whether he could play Bond himself, the actor declined to give a straight answer.
Ahmed, who studied at Oxford, has built a career defined by politically and culturally significant roles. After The Road to Guantanamo he appeared in Four Lions, Chris Morris’s darkly comic film about four British Muslims that Morris described as exposing the “Dad’s Army side of terrorism.” He has since appeared in Star Wars prequel Rogue One, comic book film Venom and Sound of Metal, in which he played a drummer losing his hearing and for which he became the first Muslim actor to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, winning a short film Oscar in 2022 for The Long Goodbye. He also led a critically praised British-South Asian reimagining of Hamlet last year.
